Are your documents vibrant and visually interesting? Microsoft Office comes with a vast array of clip art, and there are endless amounts available through other software packages or on the Web. Learn how to use them to your advantage.

Although well-illustrated documents can’t make up for a lack of content, you can capture your audiences’ attention if your documents are vibrant and visually interesting. Microsoft Office comes with a vast array of clip art, and there are endless amounts available through other software packages or on the Web. When going online to look at clips, you can categorize them so that it’s easier to find the best choice for your Office document. You can use the Microsoft Online Web site to search for and download additional clip art.

You can easily enhance an Office document by adding a picture—one of your own or one of the hundreds that come with Microsoft Office. If you need to modify your pictures, you can resize them, compress them for storage, change their brightness or contrast, recolor them, or crop them.

WordArt is another feature that adds detail to your document. Available in other Office programs, WordArt can bring together your documents—you can change its color, shape, shadow, or size. Because WordArt comes with so many style choices, time spent customizing your documents is minimal.

In Office programs, you can insert SmartArt graphics (New!) to create diagrams that convey processes or relationships. Office provides a wide-variety of built-in SmartArt graphic types from which to choose, including graphical lists, process, cycle, hierarchy, relationship, matrix, and pyramid. Using built-in SmartArt graphics makes it easy to create and modify charts without having to create them from scratch.

Instead of adding a table of dry numbers, insert a chart. Charts add visual interest and useful information represented by lines, bars, pie slices, or other markers. Office uses Microsoft Excel (New!) to embed and display the information in a chart.

Locating and Inserting Clip Art

To add a clip art image to a document, you can use the Clip Gallery or the Clip Art tab on the Toolbox. The Clip Gallery helps you search for clip art and access additional clip art available on Office Online, a clip gallery that Microsoft maintains on its Web site. The Clip Art tab on the Toolbox provides easy access to a subset of the clip art available in the Clip Gallery. You can limit search results to specific keywords with the Search box, a clip art category, or a type of media file. If you have your own images, you can import them into the Clip Gallery, and then modify their properties for search purposes. After you find the clip art you want, you can insert it.

Insert Clip Art from the Clip Gallery

Do either of the following to start the Clip Gallery:

In Word and Excel, click the Insert menu, point to Picture, and then click Clip Art.

In PowerPoint, click the Insert menu, and then click Clip Art.

To narrow your search, do one of the following:

Category. Click a category with the type of clip art you are looking for.

Search. Type the keyword(s) associated with the clip you are looking for, and then click Search.

Clip art objects (pictures and animated pictures) are images made up of geometric shapes, such as lines, curves, circles, squares, and so on. These images, known as vector images, are mathematically defined, which makes them easy to resize and manipulate. A picture in the Microsoft Windows Metafile (.wmf) file format is an example of a vector image. Clip Gallery also includes sounds or motion clips, which you can insert into a document. A motion clip is an animated picture—also known as an animated GIF—frequently used in Web pages. When you insert a sound, a small icon appears representing the sound file.

Work with the Clip Gallery

Start the Clip Gallery.

Do any of the following:

Categories. Click Categories, click New Category to create a category or click Delete to remove a selected category, and then OK.

Properties. Select a clip art image, click Properties, and then use the Description, Categories, and Keywords tabs to modify properties for search purposes, and then click OK.

Import. Click Import, select the images you want, select an import option, and then click Import.